King for Beginners

By Scott Malcomson

Published: January 27, 2002

MARTIN LUTHER

KING, JR.

By Marshall Frady.

216 pp. New York:

Lipper/Viking. $19.95.

IN the weeks following a 1956 Supreme Court decision that Alabama's racial segregation of buses violated the Constitution, a number of bombs were exploded or guns fired at the homes and churches of black civil rights leaders in Montgomery, where a boycott of the city's bus system had gone on for nearly a year. In ''Martin Luther King, Jr.,'' his new biography of the man who led the boycott, Marshall Frady writes: ''This barrage of violence served to sink King into a deep undertow of guilt. In an address to a mass meeting that strangely prefigured the one he would deliver in Memphis on the last night of his life, he shocked the congregation by suddenly blurting out, 'Lord, I hope no one will have to die as a result of our struggle for freedom here in Montgomery. Certainly I don't want to die. But if anyone has to die, let it be me!' And he strangled into tears, so stricken that he clutched the sides of the pulpit, unable to utter anything further.''

This is one King we know, the tormented tribune who shoulders firmly, somberly, with hints of regret and even reluctance, the burden of an oppressed people's hopes. Having thought and read deeply as a graduate student at Boston University, he returns to the South and the pulpit, where, Frady writes, he can translate his ideas ''immediately and spectacularly into immense action.'' As he surveys the social achievements, personal transformations and violence his leadership inspires, his heart is a knot of guilt and resolve. His road leads ever upward to death at 39.

But there are other Kings: the tactician, friend, pastor, husband, intellectual, lover, father, son. Frady sketches in the ''small, somewhat tubby child'' born to Alberta and Mike King in 1929, who grew up in Atlanta's black middle class, ''a singularly favored boy.'' He matured in the shadow of his stolid pastor father, breaking free to Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., then on to Boston, where he studied with steady passion, went out on the town and courted Coretta Scott.

As husband and wife they went to his first pastorate, in Montgomery. A year later the bus boycott began, and Frady catches us up in the familiar events of King's 13 years as a public figure. The Montgomery triumph gave him a national profile. He entered into several years of constant travel -- for the civil rights insurgency had become a movement, with sit-ins, then Freedom Rides, voter registration drives, court cases. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference tried to give the movement shape, whether through Gandhian teach-ins, attempts to win over the institutional black Baptist church, meetings with national politicians or simply King's own restless sermonizing in countless cities and towns.

As Frady tells the story, what King needed most was racial theater of such intensity that it forced social change -- which meant that he had to take his gospel of love and redemption to the worst possible enemy he could find. He tried Albany, Ga., in 1961, but was outmaneuvered by a police chief who dodged confrontation. In 1963, he latched onto the antisegregation movement in Birmingham, where ''perhaps the most inspiriting consideration'' was the enemy in chief, the public safety commissioner, Eugene Connor, better known as Bull. The Birmingham period was vicious, delirious; it ended with the city's leaders agreeing to desegregate the downtown shopping district, ''the first clear, authentic victory,'' Frady writes, ''actually won in popular confrontation and struggle, for King's movement of nonviolent mass protest.''

The Birmingham success led, not altogether directly, to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the downfall of Jim Crow segregation. After an indecisive engagement in St. Augustine, Fla., King moved on to Selma, Ala., to join the voter registration effort there. It was bloody, and successful in that it pushed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This was the end of King's Southern phase. He was coming to believe that the movement's legislative triumphs were ''at best surface changes.'' He turned his attention north and steadily broadened his targets to include the Vietnam War -- which showed, King said, Americans ''glutted by our own barbarity'' -- and poverty in general. The Poor People's Campaign, King declared, would try to move ''a sick, neurotic nation'' away from ''at least a level of its sickness.''

But with these shifts, his national support weakened dramatically, for, Frady writes, he was addressing ''a force field of interests far more monolithic but also far more elusive to confront than a Bull Connor or George Wallace's troopers on the Selma Bridge -- a profusion of resistance in which, in the words of an old gospel song, You can't find the one to blame / It's too smart to have a name.'' With this faceless enemy in mind King took his sputtering campaign to Memphis, where he was killed.

Do we need another biography of King, given that there have been three solid ones (by David Levering Lewis, David J. Garrow and Stephen Oates), almost numberless works that touch on King's life, several excellent movement memoirs and personal histories, and Taylor Branch's matchless two-volume series on America in the King years? It depends on who we are and what we know. If there was a fresh fact or insight in Frady's brief account, I couldn't find it. At the same time, the book is dramatically written and accurate in its details. It seems likely to appeal most to people who want a quick introduction to the life of a great American they don't already know much about, people who are too young or had too little interest to have read earlier works -- a population certain to grow in coming years.